Tapestry
by dancinginthesunlight
Summary: "She promises herself that this time she will put up a fight. She will force him off her island, force him to leave her in peace, whatever it takes to get him out of her life before he can become a part of it." Calypso will not let her heart be broken again. CalypsoxLeo.
1. A wondrous woven magic

**Tapestry**

_A wondrous woven magic, in bits of blue and gold  
__A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

Calypso doesn't want to admit it, but she feels him coming before she hears it. After so many years, so many heroes arriving to taunt her with dashing good looks and bravery and charm, she knows when someone new has arrived.

And so when she feels the subtle ripples in the magical strands that form Ogygia, she throws a spade at the dirt. Time passes differently on Ogygia, she knows, but this still feels too soon. Hundreds of mortal years passed between Drake and Percy – there were other, less notable heroes in the meantime, whose visits were less memorable even though they broke her heart just the same – and yet there can't have been more than a decade between Percy and this newest visitor.

So she braces herself, just like always. A part of her knows that no matter how hard she tries to resist it, she will fall in love with this new hero the second she lays eyes on him. Curse the Fates.

But like always, she promises herself that _this time _she will put up a fight. The gods and the Fates be damned, _this time _she will not let herself like this hero. She will force him off her island, force him to leave her in peace, whatever it takes to get him out of her life before he can become a part of it.

_This time_ she will not let her heart be broken.

Then she hears the crash.

She leaves her garden and rushes out to the beach, fully prepared to throw this hero into the sea herself if she has to, and yells, "What are you _doing_? You blew up my dining table!"

She has no idea whether he even speaks English, but she hasn't seen a Greek hero in years – millennia, by mortal scales – and besides, she's been practicing from the books Hermes sometimes brings her.

The hero is shouting something back, but she ignores him, clenching her fists. She knows she will have to look at him eventually and prepares herself to calm her heartbeat. She's been practicing, running down the beach and then taking deep breaths to steady her racing pulse, wondering if maybe the key is to trick her body into believing that she's not in love.

She forces herself to look at him, really look at him, and feels – nothing. Not a trace of the heart-pounding, stomach-dropping, face-flushing rush she's become accustomed to.

He's staring up at her with a mix of fear and anger splashed across his face and she's terrified that the sudden onslaught of _feelings_ are about to come racing across any minute.

No, she needs to get him off Ogygia before the island makes her feel anything for him.

"Really?" she yells at the sky, "You want to make my curse even worse! Zeus! Hephaestus! Hermes! Have you no shame?"

The hero says something else, but she ignores him and continues to scream. She knows the gods aren't really listening, they're too caught up in the conflict between their Roman and Greek sides, but it feels good to yell. She needs to say something to make the hero want to leave, something insulting, so she adds, "You think it's funny to send me this – this charbroiled runt of a boy to ruin my tranquility? This is not funny!"

_Please be angry_, she prays. _Tell me you want to leave._

"Hey, Sunshine. I'm right here, you know." The boy's voice is tinged with anger. Good.

_Charbroiled runt_ may have been a bit of an overstatement; true, the smell of smoke pervades the air, and true, he's certainly not the tallest hero she's ever met, but his darkened skin radiates sunlight and his dark curls— No. She hates him and she hates his hair.

So she drags him down to the shore and makes him say the words that will get him out of here.

"I want to leave Ogygia."

Calypso feels more ripples in the island's threads, the woven magic responding to his request, and she wonders whether she truly has found a loophole in the rules.

"Who _are_ you?" he asks, and she almost wants to tell him.

_I'm the girl who is supposed to fall in love with you._

Instead, she says, "It doesn't matter," and then, just in case: "You'll be gone soon. You're obviously a mistake."

The raft still hasn't appeared. Worry begins to bubble up within her, but she forces it down. She has made it nearly fifteen minutes with this hero without the slightest inkling of _love_.

"Any minute now…" she mutters, partly as a reminder to this hero and partly as a reminder to Ogygia.

_Please please please please please._

But then the ripples that have been forming in the tapestry of the island shuddered to a stop.

_No._

"This is wrong!" she yells.

It can't be. They always, always leave. So why is it that the one time she _wants_ a hero to go, Ogygia refuses?

The hero looks like he wants to say something, offer some comfort, but she doesn't want to listen. She wants him to go away.

So she runs.


	2. The soft, silver sadness

_Once amid the soft, silver sadness in the sky  
__There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

She wraps her hand around the base of a weed and pulls the plant out of the ground. Weeds invading her garden. Heroes invading her island. The Fates making her life a laughingstock.

She reaches for another weed, but she pulls with too much anger and the stem separates from the roots. She swears and drives her nails into the dirt to dig out the rest of the sprout. There is mud on her dress but she doesn't care.

She feels a splash against the back of her hand and realizes that she's crying. Great. More useless emotions she doesn't want.

The roots are buried deeper than she thought, so she reaches for a trowel and stabs it into the dirt, picturing Odysseus lying there, or maybe Zeus.

Calypso hears footsteps approaching and wipes her eyes furiously with the back of her hand. She will not let him see her cry.

If she ignores him, maybe the hero will go away.

"I think you've punished that dirt enough."

"Just go away!" she snaps.

Ogygia doesn't like her anger; the magic threads want her to like this hero, to love him with all her heart. Because if she doesn't love him, he can't hurt her. It's a blessing and a curse rolled into one and Calypso has had enough.

Sometimes she wishes she were mortal, if only so she could escape the vicious cycle. But she has no old age to look forward to. Her limbs will never grow heavy; creases will never frame her eyes and smile. She will never be able to drift off peacefully into death.

She has never understood why mortals are so fearful of death. After three thousand years of relentless misery she knows that in some ways Hades is the most merciful of the gods.

"You're crying," the hero – boy, she corrects herself; she can fall in love with a hero – points out.

Ogygia tells her with a gentle ripple that the boy's anger with her is fading, so Calypso snaps at him to leave her alone. She can't let him be nice to her.

He matches her anger with more sarcasm and it's easy to pick a fight with him. She feels a little rush of exhilaration. None of the other heroes ever wanted to argue, they never saw her as more than just a sweet, innocent girl; pretty, maybe, but not an equal. It feels good to argue.

And then he asks her for her story, and she tells him. And then he brings up Percy.

She closes her eyes so he can't see her eyes water, but the traitorous tears come anyway. If she loved this boy, she would have wanted him to reach out a hand to brush the tears aside. But she doesn't love him.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

So she snaps at him, three thousand years worth of anger pouring out in one fell swoop, "Would you be _sweet_ if the gods forgot their promise to let you go? Would you be sweet if they _laughed_ at you by sending you another hero," – he's not a hero, she reminds herself, because she refuses to fall in love with him, so she tacks on an insult to the end of her statement, "But a hero who looks like – like you?"

She knows she's hurting him, but she doesn't care. She needs him to get mad. To yell. To fight back. She's insulting him, over and over and over again, but the only reaction he's giving are attempts at humor. It makes her wonder whether the jokes and sarcasm are a shield he's built to protect himself from insults; whether others in the mortal world often mock him.

"Is that a trick question?"

There's another one, and she almost wants to give him the satisfaction of a laugh, but she doesn't let herself.

"_Di Immortales_!" Then she runs away from him. Again.

He follows, and her heart pounds.

Because he's mad and he might want to hurt her, she tries to convince herself. Her heart is giving her an adrenaline boost in case she needs to run. It has nothing to do with _feelings_.

But he doesn't attack her. He talks to her about the curse – bringing up Percy again, but she's _over him_, so it doesn't hurt as much as it could – and then he says what no hero has ever said before.

"I'll build something myself and get off this stupid island without your help."

"You don't understand, do you?" she says, feeling the need to hurt him more – crush his hopes, whatever it takes– "The gods are laughing at both of us. If the raft will not appear, that means they've closed Ogygia. You're stuck here the same as me. You can never leave."

Later, when he's _finally_ left her alone, the realization hits her.

The raft always came, without fail, when the hero wanted to leave. And she always, without fail, was left heartbroken, because she always, without fail, was in love with the hero.

She may have told the boy that Ogygia was closed, but she knew that wasn't true. She could still feel the island's tapestry working its magic. The invisible forces that took care of her home still cleaned and polished and she could feel the ripples in the threads trying to push her towards the boy, encouraging her to care for him and to _like_ him.

Which meant that the raft wouldn't come either because the boy didn't truly want to leave… or because she wasn't in love with the boy.

Calypso grabbed a clay pot off the shelf and threw it at the wall, but the satisfaction of watching it shatter wasn't enough. The boy would be stuck here until she fell in love with him, because he couldn't leave until he could break her heart.

The unfairness of it all overwhelmed her. The gods had promised – _promised!_ – Percy that they would release her. And yet here she was, wasting away the centuries being left brokenhearted by men over and over again.


	3. He moved with some uncertainty

_He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know  
__Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

She spends the remainder of the afternoon with one of the books Hermes brought her – years ago, on the mortal scale, back when she was still anguished by Drake's departure – and works her way through the lines she's all but memorized by now.

_Whose fault?  
__Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me  
__All he could have; I made him just and right,  
__Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall._

It was Drake who had first introduced her to the foreign terms that she encountered time and time again in Milton's book, words like _heaven_ and _hell_ and _Satan_; he had patiently explained Christianity, explained that in his time people worshipped one God, not many different gods. She hadn't understood it.

Even Milton, in his book about one God, called upon the many different gods she knew. _Sing, heavenly muse,_ he began, and Calypso often wondered whether Milton might have been a demigod, because despite the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of Satan from the place called heaven, the place Drake had once compared to Ogygia, Milton often referred back to the gods. It was both comforting and unnerving.

Calypso had asked Hermes once about the very title of the book, _Paradise Lost_. It had seemed to her that Satan was better off out of heaven. He certainly hadn't lost much of a paradise. Drake's God had always seemed cold and unforgiving.

Perhaps in that way Drake's God was like her gods. Calling her an ingrate for making one mistake – _sufficient to have stood, though free to fall_ – set up to fail, forced to pick a side and picking the wrong one.

And being punished for it for all eternity.

Perhaps Ogygia wasn't a paradise. Perhaps it was a hell.

_They therefore, as to right belonged,  
__So were created, nor can justly accuse  
__Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,  
__As if Predestination overruled  
__Their will._

Yes, all well and good for God, who could punish the fallen angels for choosing to revolt. All well and good for Zeus, who could punish her for siding with her father all those millennia ago.

"It was your choice," she imagines Zeus-or-God saying. "You could have disobeyed your father and sided with the gods."

But she didn't, and now because of one choice she is trapped. She has apologized time and time again, to no avail, because the gods are cold and unforgiving. She may have had a choice once.

She doesn't have one now.

Refuse to love this boy and be stuck with him forever, or fall in love with him and never see him again. She'll be unhappy either way.

She feels another ripple in Ogygia's threads, drawing her attention out the door of her cave and onto the boy. He's wandering aimlessly down the beach, occasionally tossing bits of scrap metal into the spray. Calypso laughs humorlessly. Iris doesn't care about Ogygia.

The boy gives up eventually. He wanders back to the shore and sits in the sand. But it's as though something within him won't let him keep still; in a split second he's on his feet again. He reaches into his toolbelt and pulls something out of it. Then his hands are flying faster than Calypso would have thought possible. She has no idea what he's doing, but she's transfixed by the motion.

Until he turns slightly, giving her a profile view. He's made a spear.

Is he going to try to kill her?

Calypso thinks back frantically to their earlier conversation, trying to remember whether she'd mentioned that she is immortal.

She has no idea what would happen if he stabs her with his spear. She wouldn't die, obviously, but she imagines it would hurt.

But instead of walking towards the cave, he turns back to the ocean. _The ocean_?

He wades in a few feet, but not far enough to be forced back onto the island by the rushing current. Calypso spent her first few centuries on Ogygia trying (in vain) to swim away and can recall all to well the pain of coughing water out of her lungs while the hot sand scorched her back. A half dozen meters away from the shoreline and the current would overwhelm the boy. It might even kill the demigod.

On second thought, maybe she _should_ encourage him to try to swim to freedom.

But no, he stays where he is in the shallows and shoves his spear down into the water. _What…?_

He's trying to fish, she realizes. He's doing a terrible job of it; the way he's thrashing about in the water he'll probably scare off anything he might have caught.

Calypso has a fishing line in her cave. She doesn't use it much; it reminds her too much of all the seafaring heroes that have wound up on Ogygia, but maybe she should lend it to the boy.

She may hate him, but she can't let him _starve_.

And so she purses her lips and makes her way to the kitchen. The island knows what she wants to do; Ogygia's invisible forces clear Calypso's books off the table before she even asks.

"Flour," Calypso tells them, and the forces provide it for her.

Even three thousand years later she still has no idea where these ingredients come from; Calypso can grow her own produce, sure, and sometimes she'll catch small game in a trap, but she doesn't grow wheat, much less have a mill, and yet Ogygia seems to have an endless supply of flour for her bread.

It's one of the mysteries of the island, she supposes.

"Salt, yeast, oil," she says, and they appear before her, more mysteries.

Calypso prepares her work area and begins mixing ingredients. She adds water from the well in the garden and kneads the dough against the table, pounding it rhythmically against the table.

Then she divides it into two loaves – one for him, one for her – and leaves it to rise.

She should leave him with just bread. It's enough so he won't be hungry, but if he wants a healthful meal he can figure it out for himself.

Ogygia is displeased with Calypso's reasoning. _Help him help him help him_, the wind whispers, and Calypso looks out the window one last time. The boy is still stabbing his spear at the water at random. He looks frustrated.

_Help him help him help him_.

"Fine!" Calypso snaps at the wind. "Have it your way."

And she heads to the garden to gather vegetables to make a stew.

By the time the stew is ready and the bread baked it's nearly sundown and the boy has given up on fishing. He sits down on the sand again and puts a hand against his stomach, a pained expression on his face. Hunger.

So Calypso fills a basket with the bread and the stew and a canteen of well water and marches out to the beach. The boy must hear her footsteps, but he doesn't turn around.

"Here," she says, shoving the basket at him so hard she nearly throws it. "Don't even _think_ about coming anywhere near my cave tonight."

Then she runs away before he can say anything.

She watches him from behind the curtains at the cave entrance. He lifts up the bread and inspects it as though it might be poisoned. She almost laughs, but stops herself.

She watches him eat. He looks lonely, the way she imagines she _always_ looks. A part of her wants to walk over and sit with him.

As soon as the thought crosses her mind she shoves it back out again. She _cannot_ go sit with him. She cannot become friends with him. She cannot fall in love with him or he will break her heart.

No, she will not sit with him.

But for the quickest moment, she wonders whether the pain of a broken heart might be worth it if it spares her the pain of watching him waste away alone.

* * *

_A/N: Seriously though, Uncle Rick, where the Hades is Calypso getting all this flour from to bake her bread?_

_Oh and I don't own _Paradise Lost_. I just figured Calypso must be doing something with her time other than gardening and baking and making clothes. Also I really wouldn't recommend reading _Paradise Lost_ in your free time because it's honestly more boring than spending 3000 years on a desert island._

_(Review?) _


	4. A torn and tattered cloth

_He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide  
__And a coat of many colors, yellow-green on either side.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

He is lighting her dining table on fire.

When Calypso first smells the smoke a few hours past sunset she checks the kitchen first, thinking that she must have missed a few embers when she dumped water over the fireplace after dinner. But the coals lay dark and cool, so she glances out the window and, sure enough, the boy is building a fire on the beach.

With the broken remnants of her dining table.

She rushes out of her cave. "What in Hades do you think you're doing?"

"This is Hades?" the boy glances around in mock surprise. "I had no idea!"

No. Don't laugh. He's not funny.

"That's my dining table," she says tersely, hands on her hips.

"Oh," he says, "I'm sorry, did you have a better plan for a bunch of scraps of wood?"

Well, no, but that's besides the point.

"You can't just use my table as kindling!"

She is fully aware that she sounds absolutely ridiculous, talking about a broken table like it's a prized possession. And it _is_ rather chilly out. But she refuses to concede the argument.

"What, you want it back?" he asks, amused.

Then he sticks his hand straight into the fire.

Calypso can't help it; she shrieks.

But the boy just rolls his eyes and pulls his hand back out, unscathed. He's holding a charred piece of wood. "All yours. Oh, sorry, did that scare you?"

"That wasn't funny!"

He smirks at her, and Calypso decides that she _hates_ his smirk, the way his mouth tilts up at the corner and his dark eyes flash— No. Stop thinking about his eyes.

"See, I knew deep down you care about me."

"I _do not_ care about you—" but she falters, realizing that she still doesn't know his name.

"Leo," he fills in, eyes flashing again in the flickering light. "Leo Valdez."

"—At all," she continues. "I couldn't care less—"

"Methinks you doth protest too much."

"Whatever," she retorts. _That's all you can come up with? _

The fire makes shadows dance across his face. She doesn't know why, but it infuriates her.

So she marches back up the beach toward her garden.

When she returns, bucket in hand, he smiles wickedly. "Miss me already?"

She doesn't answer, just lifts up the bucket and pours well water over the fire, extinguishing the flames.

"Don't burn my table," she says it as angrily as possible, but he just laughs.

"Yeah, sure. Thanks for the view." He gives her a very obvious once-over, his eyes traveling up and down her body. She can't read the expression on his face.

It takes her a second to realize that some of the water splashed onto her dress. Her _white_ dress. Even in the dark, he can probably see everything through the thin material.

"Ugh!" she crosses her arms over her chest, then thinks better of it and just turns around to run back to her cave.

She makes it halfway there when she hears footsteps behind her. It's the boy, running after her. She ignores him.

"Hey – wait. Calypso—hey!"

"What do you want?" she snaps. "I think I've made it very clear that I just want you to leave me alone."

"I'm sorry," he says, and it's not the words that make her stop but the sincerity with which he says them.

She doesn't turn around, but she lets the boy – Leo – catch up.

"I shouldn't have done that."

"Obviously."

"No," he says, "I'm serious. That was way over the line, even if you were being a little bit of a bitch back there. No offense," he adds quickly, but she glares at him anyway.

Neither of them says anything for a moment. She can hear the waves crashing lazily against the shore. There's a part of her that wants to just tell him she forgives him, which is strange because he just called her a bitch.

"Look," Leo says. "I just want to say I'm sorry. What I did wasn't okay."

His eyes gaze into hers so earnestly she has to look away.

And that's when she feels it – just a small twist in her gut, barely noticeable, that tells her that _maybe_ she can tolerate this boy's existence on her island.

Ogygia agrees – of course – and the wind picks up slightly, whispering for her to _move closer move closer move closer_.

She refuses. Instead, she just nods slightly – just enough to acknowledge that she heard him – and then takes off at a run.

"…Or you could just run away," she hears Leo say from behind her. She squeezes her eyes shut.

When she is back in the safety of her cave, she changes into a nightgown and hangs the wet dress to dry. She tries to read (_A Tale of Two Cities_ by Charles Dickens, another gift from Hermes) but the candlelight distracts her and makes her think of the _other_ fire, which makes her think of the boy.

She almost wishes she didn't know his name if only so she wouldn't have to listen to Ogygia repeating it over and over like a poem: _Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez…_

Calypso hears it everywhere: in the wind, the waves, the very threads that make up the fabric of the island.

_Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez._

She wants to scream.

She needs to do _something_. So she sits by her loom near the window and works by moonlight, letting strands of thread fly between her fingers. She has been weaving for millennia. Ogygia's invisible forces provide cotton fiber for her to spin into thread, just as they provide flour and other ingredients for her cooking.

Sometimes she'll give the finished bolts of fabric to one of the gods that comes to visit. Other times she'll make cloth bags to hold seeds for her garden. When her dresses grow threadbare, she replaces them.

She has no use for any fabric right now. The gods are too incapacitated to visit, she has already stored all the seeds she needs for the coming fall, and she has no need for new dresses.

Her mind – unhelpfully – conjures up an image of Leo's burned and torn clothing.

"Curse you, Aphrodite," she whispers, doubting that her least favorite goddess can even hear her.

And then she sets to work, estimating Leo's size and letting years of experience guide her hands. She keeps the cloth white and plain, the pattern simple. But every time she throws the shuttle she hears his name: _Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez_.

Ogygia begs her to use magic, to learn something of this boy's past, to search the fabric she's creating for a reason to care for him. She doesn't.

Hours later, she sets a plain cotton shirt out on one of the rocks by the garden, along with a bowl of fruit and two slices of bread. The bread will be stale by the time he finds it in the morning, but he deserves it. She may not want him to go hungry, but she doesn't want him to think she _likes_ him.

When she goes to bed, firelight dances behind her eyelids.

_Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez_.

* * *

_A/N: For real though, people do not give Calypso enough credit for spending all her time feeding and clothing Leo even while she hates him (okay, maybe not hate, but _at least_ strongly dislikes. Or something)._

_Anyway. Review?_


	5. Te trizó como a un vaso

**Here, have a Leo POV chapter:**

_Como un vaso albergaste la infinita ternura,  
__Y el infinito olvido te triz__ó__ como a un vaso.  
__~La Canci__ón Desesperada, Pablo Neruda_

Leo Valdez has already paced the perimeter of the island over and over again, but in the absence of anything with which to build his own raft (okay, so maybe he shouldn't have torched Calypso's dining table) he has no real plan for escape.

He wonders what the others are doing, if they've reached the House of Hades yet. He doesn't even know if they've defeated Khione.

They could be dead, for all he knows, but he shoves the thought out of his head. They can't be dead.

Calypso is no help. Ever since the campfire, she's been refusing to talk to him, just leaves him bowls of fruit and stew and bread and simple cotton shirts.

He probably deserves it. He hates himself a little for how he acted. He hadn't even seen much, anyway, since she'd extinguished the fire, just the outline of her bra or whatever it was immortal Greek chicks wore under their dresses when were bras even invented, anyway? And what did girls wear before bras were invented?

He shakes his head to clear it. Damn ADHD. What had he been thinking about? Right. Calypso's bra.

Even if he hadn't been able to see much, the darkness was no excuse. Sarcasm and humor are fair game, especially with Calypso non-stop yelling at him, but staring at her like one of the pervy douchebag guys he'd always hated at school was not okay, no matter how godsdamn _infuriating_ she might be.

He still can't get the image of the outline of her bra out of his head. Gods, it would be so much easier to deal with Calypso if she wasn't so _hot_. Not that it matters. He is completely indifferent to her appearance. He doesn't even _like_ dark eyes and caramel hair and—

Nope. He doesn't like it all.

Which explains why he finds himself heading up the footpath to her cave to apologize again, or maybe to thank her for the clothes, or to straighten out the curtain-rod that hangs crookedly over the entrance, or… well, he's not quite sure _why_ he's heading up there, but it's definitely not because he finds her attractive.

He tries to knock, but she doesn't have a _door_, so he ends up rapping his fist against the crystal wall of the cave and slicing open the skin across his knuckles.

"Ow, _fuck_!" he swears. Then, louder, "Calypso?"

No answer.

He parts the curtains with his non-bleeding hand and steps through into her cave.

He isn't sure what he was expecting – something dark and gloomy, probably. But the cave is flooded with the sunlight that streams through the windows someone must have carved into the rock. The walls are dotted with more crystals that act as prisms and cast rainbows across the plain wood table and chair she has set up in the corner. There's a fireplace and a loom and not much else.

No wonder she's always baking and weaving. He would be too if he'd been trapped on an island for three thousand years with no wi-fi.

"Calypso?" he calls again.

He walks a little farther into the cave. There's another curtain hanging, blocking off the back room, and he pushes this one aside too.

Then he's standing in her bedroom.

Her bed is really more of a cot, with a simple quilt folded at the end on top of white cotton sheets. He's not sure what he expected, but the bed looks more fitting of a normal girl, not a goddess.

But it's the walls that capture most of his attention. They are covered floor to ceiling with unpainted wood bookshelves. Leo's mouth drops open. Every inch of her walls is covered in books and still she has enough to leave stacks on the floor as well. Most of the volumes are in English, but he recognizes some Ancient Greek and Latin titles and still others in languages he can't read.

_The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hamlet. The Iliad. The Cat in the Hat. _Something he thinks might be _War and Peace_ in the original Russian.

The books must be her way of keeping up with the outside world. He has no idea where she gets them from; maybe the gods also cursed her to have an infinite amount of summer reading.

But Holy Hera she's been keeping busy, if the tattered spines are anything to judge by.

He hears a scream and then suddenly a clay pot is flying past his head. It smashes into the bookshelf beside his head and shatters into a dozen pieces.

"What are you _doing_?"

Leo throws up a hand to block his face in case Calypso feels like throwing any more cookware at him.

"You threw a pot at my head!"

"You're getting blood on my carpet!"

He looks down at his hand, and sure enough, drops of bright red blood are spattering across the floor.

"Oh," he says, "I'm sorry. I would have been more careful, except you _just tried to murder me_!"

"I thought you were—" but she cuts herself off. "You shouldn't come into my house without permission."

"So you threw a pot at my head?"

"It didn't hit you," she says.

He almost storms off in frustration, but then Calypso's tone grows softer. "Here. Let me wash that cut for you. It'll get infected."

She rushes out of the room, returning moments later with a bucket of water. She leans in close to Leo, close enough that he can smell cinnamon on the air, and Leo's breath catches. One more step and she'd be close enough to kiss him.

He doesn't know why he's thinking about kissing her. He's never kissed _any_ girl before, much less a crazy, pot-throwing immortal, but somehow he feels his eyes drawn to her lips as she puts her hand on his shoulder—

And tears off the sleeve of his shirt.

"Hey!" he protests, but then Calypso takes his hand in her own and dabs at the scrape with the damp strip of cotton. It stings a little, but her hands are gentle.

When she finishes cleaning off the dried blood she reaches for his other sleeve.

"Look, I know you think I'm sexy, but you don't have to go tearing off my clothes," he jokes.

She shoves him, but there's no real malice in it.

Which is strange. But also kind of nice.

Calypso tears off his second sleeve also and uses it to bandage his hand. "I'll make you a new shirt tomorrow," she says, tying off the cloth strip.

"Thanks."

A beat, then, "You can leave now." She's watching him with her eyebrows raised.

"Where did you get all these books from?" he blurts.

He almost expects her not to answer, but she shrugs. "Hermes, mostly. Drake left a couple when he— Anyway. Hestia brings books sometimes. _Those_ are all from Aphrodite," she points at a stack in the corner where Leo can see volumes like _Fifty Shades of Gray _and _Twilight_. "And _no_, I haven't read them."

"You just dog-eared the pages for fun."

She glares at him. "You should go."

As he's exiting the cave, she yells after him, "And don't you dare come into my cave without permission again!"

She's even hot when she yells – wait, what?

_A/N:_ _Most of this fic will be in Calypso's POV, but every once in a while I feel like it's important to get some of Leo's perspective too. So here._

_Also, a translation of the Neruda quote from the top: "Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness,/and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar." See get it she threw a pot at him it's poetic I tried okay yeah so in other news my Spanish homework is taking over my life._

_Review?_


	6. A figure gray and ghostly

_As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared  
__A figure gray and ghostly, beneath a flowing beard.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

She dreams that Leo Valdez is kissing her.

Not softly, either; it's a rough, aggressive struggle for dominance as she tangles her fingers in his hair and he trails his mouth down the line of her jaw. But his hands are gentle; strong arms holding her against his chest, calloused palms caressing her skin, even as his lips and tongue draw out sounds from her throat she never thought she would make.

Calypso wakes with a start, sitting upright in bed and struggling to catch her breath. The full moon is high in the sky; it must be close to midnight.

"Just a dream," she whispers to herself.

She hears a soft chuckle from beyond the doorway. "Perhaps."

She knows that voice, knows it and hates it, and so she swings her legs over the side of the bed and growls, "Eros."

He doesn't materialize, but she can feel his presence in her room, a dark energy that permeates the air with a sense of foreboding.

It figures that when all the gods she _does_ like are too conflicted between their Roman and Greek forms to stop by for a visit, the ones she _doesn't_ like have no problem dropping by to ruin her life.

She is _slightly_ surprised to see Eros here, though. Usually it's Aphrodite who comes to torment her with talk of happy-go-lucky, head-over-heels, over-the-moon romance. Eros is generally concerned with the more painful, deeply emotional facets of love, and Calypso already knows enough about _that_. She's (obviously) less than thrilled to see him here.

She makes the three-fingered ward against evil, attempting to force him off Ogygia, but he remains there.

Because, technically, he's not _evil_. Not in the sense the protection ward was designed for, anyway. Curse the Fates.

She settles for shooting a dirty look in the general direction of his voice. "What do you want?"

"The question," he says, his tone dangerously low, "is not what _I _want. It's what _you_ want."

She notices that the consonants of his Greek – what should be smooth _k_'s and _l_'s – are tinged with a harsher, almost Latin accent. Maybe even Eros is not completely free of his Roman form.

Not that it matters. She hates Cupid just as much as she hates his Greek counterpart.

"I don't need any of your riddles."

"I don't think it's much of a _riddle_ anymore. You know what you want."

She thinks back to her dream, to Leo Valdez's lips pressed against hers, but immediately shoves the thought out of her head.

"I _want_ you to get out of my house. I _want_ to be left alone – actually, I _want_ you to tell your mother and the other Olympians to honor their promise and let me leave this island."

"That's not all you want."

It is incredibly hard to glare at someone with no corporeal form, but she tries anyway. She's focused so hard on trying to figure out where he's standing that she misses the arrow flying through the air until it's too late.

"Ow!" she yells. "You _dare_ attack me in my own home—" but the rest of her threat is cut off as a series of images runs through her mind.

_Leo landing on her beach. His eyes flashing as they argue. Wiping the sweat off his forehead as he fixes her curtain when he thinks she isn't looking. His eyes drifting to her mouth as she bandages his hand._

"Stop it," she breathes, but she has to lean against the wall to keep from collapsing under the weight of her emotions.

_His hand running across the spines of her books. His smile when he comes up with a particularly witty remark. Ogygia's threads vibrating in excitement when he conjures up a flame._

"Please. Stop."

"You have to face me if you want to—"

She hears what sounds like a taught wire being pulled from somewhere to her right and manages to duck before the god's second arrow can pierce her skin.

"I don't _have_ to do anything!" Calypso snaps. "I know what you want me to say. It would just _thrill_ you if I made some kind of declaration of love for that – that _boy_" –_Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez_, the air whispers— "Because once again, you get to have the last laugh. The hero ditches Calypso again, just like always, and it must be _so_ amusing for you, watching me go through this over and over and over again! But I'm done," she states. "I'm done with all of it."

Out of the corner of her eye she thinks she sees something start to materialize out of the shadows. Eros's body?

"You do realize," he says, his form flickering like candlelight, "that in order for Leo Valdez to leave Ogygia _you _must accept your feelings for him."

"And you do realize," she says, knowing that it might not be the wisest idea to mock a god, but too angered to care, "that the gods promised to free me from Ogygia—"

"The Olympians are in no condition right now to honor their promises," Eros says. "So you can either accept that you feel something for this boy and let him return to his friends or continue to act like a stubborn, petulant little girl—"

Calypso slaps him.

She regrets it instantly, doesn't even know why she let her guard down and acted on impulse around _Eros_ of all people. He is certainly not the god she wants to anger.

She's never hit anyone before.

She half expects him to obliterate her. He probably could if he tried; she has no idea whether goddesses _can_ be obliterated, but despite what Zeus and his ilk may think, Calypso knows that Eros has powerful abilities beyond those of the Olympians.

But instead of destroying her he simply gives her a sad look. "You would do well to heed my advice. Have you even heard the prophecy of his quest against Gaea?"

She shakes her head no, still stunned that Eros hasn't tried to kill her for her irreverence.

"_Mundus in tempestate vel in ignum cadere_," he recites, his tone solemn.

He says them in Latin, maybe another sign of Cupid's influence on him, but Calypso translates them to Greek. "To storm or fire the world must fall."

_To storm or fire…._

"You think Leo might be the one to destroy Gaea."

Eros doesn't give her a full answer, but as he fades back into the darkness, he says, "You would do well to heed my advice. If Gaea succeeds in her endeavors because you hold Leo captive, the gods will _never_ honor their promise."

She paces the perimeter of the cave twice to ensure that Eros truly is gone – lucky him, able to leave Ogygia at will – before returning to her bed.

It feels like hours before she is able to fall asleep. She tosses and turns in her bed, listening to Ogygia whispering _Leo Valdez Leo Valdez Leo Valdez_. For the first time in ages, she finds herself crying.

When she finally drifts off, Leo fills her dreams.

She wonders vaguely whether this is Eros's doing; whether he is providing her with a sort of compromise. If she can't have him in real life, perhaps seeing him each time she shuts her eyes is not a terrible second choice.

* * *

_A/N: I don't actually know Latin so blame Google Translate for any grammar mistakes._

_GUYS Uncle Rick tweeted that we get Nico POV chapters in BoO I'm so excited I'm so excited this is all I have ever wanted this is so exciting this is so exciting (and also I'm probably going to end up crying my eyes out from all the angst and internalized self-hatred but oh my gods Nico di Angelo ahhhh someone give this kid a happy ending and a boyfriend and some closure about the Bianca stuff and some more closure about the Percy stuff and a BFF in Jason or Reyna I'm not picky really and ahhhhhh Nicooooo)._

_Sorry. Rant over. Review?_


	7. The ever-changing view

_My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue  
__An everlasting vision, of the ever-changing view.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

When Calypso wakes the next morning, Eros's words flash across her mind: _You can either accept that you feel something for this boy and let him return to his friends or continue to act like a stubborn, petulant little girl…_

And yes, she decides, while she sets out his breakfast in the dim light of the predawn hours. She feels _something_ for Leo Valdez. She's been noticing it more and more, whether or not she wants to admit it. Just the day before she had yelled at him for the clamor he had been creating, shouted at him about scaring off the birds, but no matter how _infuriating_ he was, she couldn't stop the impulse to chide him about not eating for two days.

And she couldn't stop the rush of butterflies in her stomach when she saw the makeshift forge he had created. Watching his hands fly across the pieces of scrap metal was almost hypnotic. And if she could just build off those feelings, maybe, _maybe_, she could let something grow.

But she's not _in love_ with him. And so the magic raft won't appear.

Which is good, she reasons, because it's painful enough letting go of a hero who she had never felt anything _but_ love for. That pain is a gut-wrenching, heart-brekaing, tear-inducing maddening rush of misery that she tried so hard to never feel again.

But the pain of heartbreak can be overcome. It takes time, yes, and nights spent sobbing into her pillow and days spent cursing the gods and the Fates and the _stupid_ girlfriends and wives and lovers who always dragged the hero away from her. But eventually she always manages to move on from heartbreak.

But as annoying as Leo Valdez is, they're falling into something that might be classified as a friendship. In her long (pathetic) life, she's never had a real _friend_ before, has no idea what it would be like to lose one.

_Friends._

The thought simultaneously thrills and terrifies her.

And yet she hardly knows anything about him. She knows that he sometimes struggles to control his power over fire. That his hands are constantly in motion, either building something or accentuating his speech with wide gestures or tapping out a staccato rhythm against the nearest surface. She knows that whenever she says something particularly scathing, a look of pain crosses over his face that he tries to hide behind humor. It's almost like all the jokes and sarcasm are a shield against whatever horrors the world has inflicted upon him.

She doesn't know why she is so curious about those horrors – no, she's lying. She knows exactly why.

She sighs. If Eros is right and Gaea's downfall is dependent on Leo Valdez, she needs to start acknowledging these feelings.

Even if it's painful.

While the stew she's making for lunch cooks, she stands by her loom and sings a few soft notes. Seeing the past is not complicated magic and within seconds figures start to form in the woven strands of cloth:

_Hera watching stoically as a curly-haired toddler stray dangerously close to a fireplace. A woman with Leo's eyes _– his mother, Calypso realizes – _singing a lullaby in a language that sounds vaguely like Latin. Leo's mother tapping her fingers against a table and watching as Leo repeats the gesture. _

Calypso watches in fascination as the images start to come faster: _A fire, a woman screaming, Leo sobbing in the corner. A building labeled "Child Protective Services." Meetings with authority figures. Leo – older now, maybe 11 or 12 – running away from a house with a white picket fence. Spending the night in an alley, tapping his fingers against the walls and trying not to cry. Being picked on by his classmates in school, realizing that acting out and making jokes are one way to stop the bullying._

_ Now he's a teenager, attacking Anemoi Thuellai with a blonde-haired boy and a dark-haired girl. Being told his father is Hephaestus. Leaving on a quest, fighting monsters. _

In the later images, he's wearing a green patterned jacket. She watches as it gets engulfed in flames – much like so many of the cotton shirts she's provided for him—

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

She rolls her eyes; she's _told_ him to work more quietly. If he scares off all the birds—

But when she glances out the window, she sees him straightening out the curtain-rod that hangs across the mouth of her cave. It's been crooked for _millennia_, and she's never been able to get it exactly level, and yet Leo Valdez is standing there, using a level that he must have gotten out of his tool-belt to set it straight.

Without being asked.

It's the nicest thing anyone has ever done for her.

Most of the heroes simply accepted her kindness. They ate the food she cooked and wore the clothes she weaved with the occasional word of thanks but never any return gesture or offer to help.

And here Leo Valdez is fixing the curtain-rod.

He must have fixed the fountain, also, she realizes with a start. She had awoken this morning to find it functioning again for the first time in a century. And her gardening shears—

She thinks back to that army jacket and then looks at the loom. With a little magic, perhaps…

And so she spends the rest of the morning weaving and singing.

She's finished with the cloth of the jacket in an hour, so she pulls out her dyes – she hardly ever uses them – and tries to mix the right shade of green.

Some of the dye splatters across her dress, so she changes into a new one – red, for a change, instead of her usual white – while she waits for the pieces to dry. Then she sews them together, singing all the while.

A flameproof jacket to grow while he does, to thank him for the fountain and the curtain-rod and the gardening shears.

She brings it to him with his lunch.

"Bronze bulls, girl!" he yells when she tries to present it to him. "Don't sneak up on me like that!"

"I wasn't _sneaking_," she protests, back to snapping at him despite what Eros might say. "I was bringing you these."

She watches his expression carefully as he picks up the clothes she's made him. His eyes widen in surprise. "How?"

_Because refusing to like you will lead to Gaea's rise._

She pretends to misunderstand his question and explains that the clothes are fireproof.

"So… you made an exact replica of my favorite outfit. Did you, like, Google me or something?"

Percy had said that word once before, _Google_, but she can't remember what it means. "I don't know that word."

"You looked me up," he says, smirking in a way that makes her stomach drop. "Almost like you had some interest in me."

_Tell him tell him tell him_, the wind whispers, but Calypso is so _fed up_ with this island that she snaps back a sarcastic retort.

"Oh yeah," Leo says, grinning in a way that makes her breath catch, "You're really warming up to me."

Two can play at this game, she decides, so she responds, "I was only returning a favor. You fixed my fountain."

They argue for a few minutes, but it's playful. The way friends might argue.

"Oh yeah," she says finally. "You're really warming up to me."

He glares at her, but his eyes hold the trace of a smile. Ogygia whispers excitedly, but Calypso feels a sadness creeping in.

She could get lost in those eyes. Eros would want her to and Leo's quest depends on it. But she'd promised herself after Percy that she would never let herself be hurt again.

It's a Catch-22, she thinks, like the title of one of the books Hermes had dropped off between Drake and Percy.

She changes the subject. "What are you building?"

He explains it to her, a seeing device – impossible, she thinks, but when she says that allowed he asks about the army jacket.

"Seeing the past is simple magic. Seeing the present or future –that is not."

"Yeah, well, watch and learn, Sunshine," he says, and she's about to tell him not to call her _Sunshine_ when he continues, "I just connect these last two wires and—"

But something goes wrong and the device lets off a stream of sparks that set his sleeve on fire. Calypso covers her mouth with her hand to hide her laughter.

And then Leo rips his shirt off.

"Not a word," he says, noticing her laughter, but suddenly she's face to face with his bare chest.

His abs aren't taut with muscles the way the other heroes' had been. She can see scars crossing his skin, telling the stories of his battles and accidents. She's always been fascinated by scars; a visible testament of a person's past.

Leo looks uncomfortable, as though he might be self-conscious about her seeing him shirtless. And it's true, there's nothing about his appearance that is particularly breathtaking.

But she can see the faint definition of muscle under his skin, can picture it pulled tight across his chest if he would just hold his chin up and throw his shoulders back.

There's nothing particularly breathtaking about his appearance, but there is _potential_ there. After all, she thinks, it's not as though _his_ life will stop at fifteen.

No, once he's off this island he'll grow, and mature, and fight battles and monsters that will give him the confidence he is sorely lacking now.

He's still eyeing her warily, so she thinks up a borderline-mean response: "Nothing worth commenting on."

But she hopes he can tell from her voice that she's not being completely serious.

* * *

_A/N: Just a few more chapters to go, guys! I think I'm going to end this fic with Leo leaving Ogygia. I have a few ideas of how (I hope) future scenes will go down (meaning after Leo comes to rescue Calypso, obviously), but I don't have any kind of overarching plot to connect them other than "they live happily ever after" etc., so I think I'm going to publish them as a series of one-shots. That means this fic will have probably 3-4 more chapters. Just so you all know. Let me know if you have suggestions for future scenes that you'd like to see because I can always use new ideas._

_Review?_


	8. Someone's wicked spell

_It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell  
__And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well.  
__~Tapestry, Carole King_

"If you want that device to work, perhaps you should try a musical invocation." She says it mostly just to break the silence, because Leo Valdez is standing there with no shirt on and it's _unnerving_.

She anticipates his sarcastic response before he says it, something about tap-dancing to fix his machines, but she ignores him and sings the practiced incantation, letting the Greek words tumble from her mouth and brush against Ogygia's magic threads. She has to focus more strength into it than normal because Leo wants to see the _present_ and Ogygia often resists images of the outside world.

She feels Leo's eyes on her, seemingly staring at her and through her at the same time. His jaw has gone slack, lips slightly parted— _don't think about his mouth_.

"Any luck?" she asks, trying to distract herself from her own line of thought, but Leo snaps back to awareness and hovers over the screen.

"Nothing. Wait…"

But she can see it to, images of other teenagers pouring across the screen, shifting quickly from scene to scene. She can't make sense of it, but tries anyway, and Leo patiently explains that the Greek demigods are preparing for war against Roman invaders. These are outside problems that should not concern her, but Calypso feels a knot of worry form in her chest for Leo's friends.

"Oh, that's not good," Leo says suddenly, pointing to a new image.

"A Roman standard," she says, recognizing it from the tales Hermes told during her early days on Ogygia.

"And this one shoots lightning, according to Percy," he says.

Calypso knows that Leo meant it as an offhanded comment. He probably didn't even think twice about the effect that Percy's name would have on her—

Although, to be honest, it's much less pronounced than it should have been. Which is strange. Rather than the overwhelming heartache she expected, Percy's name conjures up more of a faded melancholy.

And yet she still feels irrationally angry about the fact that Leo mentioned it, so much so that when the screen goes dark an instant later and he yells out in protest she snaps, "I suppose that is your girlfriend?"

The girl on the screen was tall, with tanned skin just a shade lighter than Leo's and chestnut brown hair that flew behind her in the wind. She walked with her shoulders thrown back, chin held high, and Calypso finds herself making a mental comparison. Would Leo think she was prettier than this girl?

She hates herself for the thought; first, for being jealous of some Roman praetor, and second, for measuring her self-worth in terms of what some _boy_ thinks of her. She's promised herself time and time again that she will stop thinking like this, but it's an easy pattern to fall back into.

"Your Penelope? Your Elizabeth? Your Annabeth?" She shouldn't push like this, but suddenly she's on a defensive roll.

"What? That's Reyna. She's not my girlfriend."

Calypso ignores the flood of relief that rushes through her body.

"I need more!" Leo is yelling. "I need—"

The rest of his statement is cut off as the earth begins to shake.

"_Need! Need is an overused word,_" Calypso recognizes the voice as Gaea's before Leo even manages to drop the shocked expression from his face. Gaea continues talking: "_You don't _need_ this, my poor boy. It would make no difference. Your friends will die, regardless._"

Calypso clenches her hands into fists. Gaea's words sound like the words Ogygia has been whispering to her for millennia. _It would make no difference. Try as hard as you want, you'll fall in love and be heartbroken, regardless._

Leo provides another scathing remark ("What I don't need are more lies from you!"), which surprises Calypso because he looks like he is about to pass out.

Gaea is speaking again: "_Now you are trapped here, helpless, while the mortal world dies._"

Calypso notices Leo's fists are clenched like her own. She sees the first trails of smoke, but it takes a moment for her to register what is happening and by then Leo's hands are surrounded by fire.

She puts a hand on his shoulder to calm him. She may be immortal, but he certainly isn't, and she has a feeling that Gaea wouldn't take too kindly to fireballs.

"Gaea," she says, making the three-fingered protective ward even though she knows it won't be much use against the Earth-mother. "You are not welcome."

"_Ah, Calypso_," Gaea turns her attention to her. Calypso had been relatively calm before, but now she felt the first hints of anxiety. "_Still here I see…_"

_Ignore her ignore her ignore her_, Calypso tells herself, but try as she might the words still filter through her mind. "_I offer you a chance Zeus could never give you._"

"Where were you these last three thousand years?" Calypso snaps. It's useless to snap at a Titan, she knows, but Gaea's words cause rage to bubble up within her.

She realizes too late that her anger is probably exactly what Gaea wants, probably a part of her plan, but Calypso ignores her hesitations.

"_The Earth is slow to wake,_" Gaea says, "_When I remake the world, this prison will be destroyed as well_."

"Ogygia destroyed?" It takes her a moment to process the words. She may hate that she cannot leave Ogygia, cannot see the world.

But Ogygia is also the only home she can remember. For it to just be _gone_…

"_You do not have to be there when it happens. Kill this boy. Spill his blood upon the earth, and help me to wake. I will free you and grant you any wish._"

Gaea is out of her mind. Calypso may have sided with the Titans once out of a sense of familial obligation, but she will never _murder_ to achieve a goal. She has a sense of morality.

And then Gaea twists the knife in deeper. "_Would you still have the demigod Percy Jackson? I will spare him for you. I will raise him from Tartarus. He will be yours, to punish or to love, as you choose. Only kill this trespassing boy. Show your loyalty._"

Before she had met Leo, she might have considered it. She would never have murdered Leo, but she might have tried to negotiate with Gaea. But even with the possibility of seeing Percy again hanging over her head, Calypso is furious at Gaea. She is not some chess piece in the Titans game to be played when needed and cast aside at whim.

Leo, for his part, looks terrified, as though he expects her to stab him with her gardening shears as soon as she has the chance. Does he really think so little of her?

She makes the three-fingered ward against evil, focusing all her energy on casting Gaea out. "This is not just my prison, grandmother. It is my home. And _you_ are the trespasser."

Leo is watching her with an expression that is a mix between confusion and admiration. Calypso decides that she rather enjoys the admiration part.

* * *

_A/N: Sorry for the late update! Also for the fact that this chapter is mostly dialogue. Next chapter will be more fun, I promise. Review?_


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